For another example, Ted Kennedy opposed the death penalty before his last brother, Robert Kennedy, was murdered.
But forthe sentencing of the murderer, Sirhan Sirhan, Kennedy wrote a letter to the court - asking for the death penalty not to be imposed.
So, one person changing their position doesn't prove anything about the broader issue.
Who knows why the poet really opposed it beforehand?
The reaction to the evil of killing to want to kill the killer is normal. As with any murder - including the original one by the murderer - the question is whether the sanctity of life will be understood and respected. Sometimes, it's not, and you have a murder. Execute the killer, and you have a second killing.
For those of you that are categorically against the death penalty, do you feel like you can really sympathize with those who have lost someone?
Yes. But I think you mean empathize.
If so, how do you reconcile one's natural (and in my opinion just) desire for retribution with those feelings?
By understanding tht you are making the same mistake the killed did, youare being like the killer, to disrespect life to indulge your empty desire for revenge.
In my opinion, most people do not really have a strong appreciation for the sanctity of life.
So, their restraint on killing is sort of shallow. 'Police accused of shooting too quickly' - well, he was probably guilty, and if not, these things happen, the police have to make quick choices'. 'The President says we're threatened by Grenada and must send in the Marines'. 'Well, why would he want to send them if it weren't true. It's just a bunch of lefties anyway and they'd probably ally with Castro and become little tyrants, so I don't care, like its worth spending time to get informed on some little patch of sand called Grenada.' 'A killer was executed today'. 'Good, I hate those murderers'.
People either have developed the appreciation that all human life is sacred or they haven't.
If they do, they hate the wrong the murderer did, they mourn, they can understand the fury at the terrible, perhaps thoughtless, perhaps selfish, perhaps misguided violence.
Whether the murderer killed out of sexual compulsion, or expressing their anger as a gang member, or as part of a burglary, or as with Bill Cosby's son a basic robbery, or killed a spouse out of some combination of anger and getting insurance money, or because they hated the person's race or that they were gay, or out of the 'defendng of honor' over a bar argument - they pretty much all leave you disgusted with the loss for a bad reason, furious at the person's bad choice, aghast at how much harm some jackass can do.
Sometimes it's as simple as channeling the feelings of loss into anger to view executing the murderer as some way to prove you loved the personthey killed.
One person honors them by taking positive action; another decides they want the murderer killed, and if they don't get that, they will feel there's a huge injustice.
That person does not 'appreciate the sanctity of human life', the fact that their only choice is whether to kill one more person or not.
The bottom line for someone who does understand the sanctity of human life, is that even the disgusting murderer deserves it and killing them is wrong.
And that as wronged as the loved ones are - it's up to them to not kill and deal with their loss another way, and say no to revenge.
In my opinion many who oppose the death penalty, like the poet in the link used to be, are naive. If something really happened to you, your friends or family, you would want retribution, which many cases can only be the death of the perpetrator.
And I'd say you are morally naive, not to understand why you are supporting something wrong. The 'if it happens to you' argument just shows you lack much conviction. That your morals are at some level of 'ya, ya, whatever for others, but if I'm the one affected, then those are out the window and I'll choose differently'. That's the basic cause of bad morals, or hypocrisy. You need to ask yourself some hard questions so you can choose positions that all meet the standard 'the same if it happened to you.'
And when you choose capital punishment, you are not much different than the killer, who had HIS reasons to want to kill.
(Although I'm sure someone will raise the issue, this thread is not about falsely-convicted people. You can argue for higher burdens of proof for capital cases, but for this thread assume that there are cases where the evidence or plea clearly shows guilt.)
It's an important topic, but this thread is about the guilty.
Edit: And for those of you who think that retributive justice is only for emotional basketcases I suggest you read what
Kant has to say about it.[/quote]
Your own link raises the same sort of question and challenges the justification of capitali punishment. I'll re-post part of it:
Exactly what Kant means here is not entirely clear. But the general idea seems clear enough: even a person guilty of murder is to be treated with a certain sort of dignity, because even the murderer is still a person -- still an end in himself. Punishments that don't respect the humanity of the criminal are outside the pale of morality. They are not justice, they are pure, unadulterated revenge. And it would be a mistake to confuse what Kant means by "retribution" with revenge. The instinct for revenge is a natural one; so is the instinct to take things we want that don't belong to us, as anyone who has spent time around young children will testify. But morality requires us to rise above our mere instincts. That's what makes it hard to be a virtuous person. And in the sphere of punishment, morality requires that we respect the humanity of the person we are punishing. Naively, it might seem that this is impossible. When I punish someone, I do something that is, in most cases, against their will. I don't respect his wishes and I don't respect his freedom. There is a reply to this. Morality does not entitle us to have all our wishes respected. That is so obvious that it needs no comment. Furthermore, in punishing a wrongdoer, we do respect her freedom: we take seriously the idea that she is responsible for what she did, and was free to do otherwise. In punishing the person, we are showing them a certain kind of respect. In fact, we might go further. Someone who really wishes, as a general principle, that he or she should be able to do bad things and not be punished is someone who hasn't gotten it as far as morality is concerned. We can't both will that wrongdoers should be punished and also will that we be exempt from punishment. So punishing a wrongdoer amounts to respecting his or her "rational will." (Compare: I might be in a self-loathing frame of mind and wish that someone would treat me badly. But if anyone obliges me, they aren't really respecting my humanity; they aren't really treating me as an end in myself.)
I was getting ready with some points such as how you don't address the lack of moral development in the murderer by killing him, but the writer attacked capital punishment:
Notice where this leaves us: on the one hand, punishing a person may be a way of respecting his or her humanity. On the other hand, some forms of punishment violate the humanity of the person being punished, and in the process debase us. But now an interesting question arises. Most is us agree: punishing a torturer by torture is not acceptable. A person in the throes of torture is a person who has, at least for the time being, had their humanity expunged. But the opponent of capital punishment will ask: isn't murder like torture in this respect? After all, a murderer robs his victim entirely of her humanity. But now we must ask: if we execute murderers, might this not be one of those very cases, like torture, in which the jus talionis goes too far? Take a different case. Suppose a particularly savage criminal left his victims alive, but performed some sort of surgery on them that destroyed their mental capacities -- that left them virtually sub-human. Kant would (or should, in all consistency) insist that it would not be appropriate to punish the wrongdoer by subjecting him to the same procedure. The fact that the criminal did not respect the humanity of his victims does not entitle us to rob him of his humanity. But if this is so, one can wonder: how could capital punishment be justified? In killing a murderer, the state takes it upon itself to extract his humanity from him in the most final way. So it is fair to ask: can a system of punishment that really takes the categorical imperative seriously really permit the death penalty? If torture and psychosurgery are not acceptable forms of punishment, why is it that execution still is?[/quote]
Kany may have used some tortured reasoning to justify capital punishment; I'll disagree with him.
That's not all that surprising - that he followed the logic of his principle of universalization some places so far that it was failing to consider the morality in some areas.
Selectivity in applyijng that sort of thing doesn't help, either. The bottom line is, you don't need Kant's arguments either way to understand the issue is the sanctity of life.
There are times that sanctity is not followed for various reasons. Some seem easier to justify; the hostage taker who is a threat to his hostages being shot to protect them.
Others are more and more debatable, as we make compromises - especially in government mbudgets, when choices are made to have a Smithsonian Institution, a funding for art, that improves the quality of life - while not spending that money on programs that would definitely save lives (whether healthcare, more police, etc.)
But we do make those treadeoffs, with a patchwork of logic that isn't clearly right or wrong.
Let's say that I could tell you as a political offical that if you spend $1 million on an educational campaign against drunk driving, it will definitely save 100 lives. That might seem like a good investment. Then I say there are diminishing returns - you need to spend $10 million to save the next ten lives; and you need to spend $100 million to save one life after that.
You might agree or disagree to any of those three levels. But it won't have some really clean logical justification. The fact is that these decisions usually are made for pretty arbitrary reasons, and based on the competing dollars, with plenty of compromises based on less than clear principles. You aren't going to be able to show where Kant said why you should fund this amount and not that. Justifications used tend to be a hodge-podge of selectively appealing to 'personal responsibility' and such.
Our society is filled with a variety of justices and injustices that don't fit a clean moral rule. Those moral rules are more used as convenient, for the partial efforts.
But the morality is rarely more clear than on the question of capital punshment, where it's the most cold-blooded sort of taking of human life - for vengenance, for politics.
If it cost three times more to keep the murderer in prison than to execute him, I'd say we should keeep him in prison. But even for those who do not appreciate the moral reason not to execute him, and would cite money as a factor inthe decision - the facts is, it's reversed - the legal proceedings minimally required by the constitution for capital punishment make it cost on average three times more to execute than to imprison.
In short, I'll repeat my original statement, that IMO, the naivete on the issue lies with the supporters of killing murderers (and others, at times), a moral naivete.
The deterrence argument is interesting in theory - *if* yiou could show that capital punishment saved the lives of other innocent victims by deterring other murderers, would that justify it? I think you can make a case about the other innocnt victims counting for more than the murderers, but I'd have problems with the argument for various reasons - and your own Kant link says it's wrong. But it's theoretical because studies find it does not have that effect.
I think we are obligated not to kill for the reasons capital punishment is supported.
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